Keep Doing That Forever
by singsongsung
Summary: Nate/Serena. Five times they tell themselves it's just sex before they let themselves admit that it's been much more all along.


**A/N: **This is going to be five chapters long, based on each verse from the Stars song _The First Five Times_. It is M-rated, though it's not super-smutty as I'm still sort of testing the waters in that area of my writing. If I get a little more comfortable with it in the next couple chapters…who knows how it'll go? Anyway, I've got it all outlined and partially written and I'm excited to tell this story for them; it'll keep me busy during the hiatus. Other characters and couples will appear over the course of this, but it's centered and focused around NS. Reviews would be lovely!

**Keep Doing That Forever**

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**August 12th, 2009

_the first time in the backyard_

_underneath the plastic sheeting_

_outside it was pouring_

_and we were drunk as shit_

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When Nate thinks about Serena, or rather, about himself and Serena together, as a _we_ or an _us_, a line of a song often drifts to the front of his mind. He doesn't know what the name of the song is, or who sings it, can only remember the details that connect to Serena: the song's about some girl named Caroline (her middle name), good times (he always has those with her), and touching hands (something that reminds him very distinctly of tipsy Serena, hands all over him), and that one lyric that makes Nate think of him and her, of them together (_where it began, I can't begin to know when_).

He supposes the beginning of _NateandSerena_ could be pinpointed in several different places. Maybe on their first-ever play date, when he decided that her hair was even brighter than a yellow crayon and that he was utterly enthralled by it, and then by her, when she not only let him touch her hair but even agreed happily to play with his Legos. Perhaps it began the summer they were eight and she shed her frilly dress for a pair of his boxer shorts so that it would be easier to play, when she chased him across the lawn and kissed him in the grass to give him the cooties he'd claimed she had and his stomach had flipped over. It could've begun the first time he saw her cry and felt an overwhelming urge to make sure she never shed another tear, or maybe the first time he saw her in a bikini and he felt the sudden need for a cold shower, or maybe it all started the time they fell asleep together in his bed and woke up holding hands. The night they had sex after a wedding on a barstool might've marked their beginning, or maybe the way his heart leapt when he heard she was back, maybe the summer he spent longing to be his real (rather than fake) girlfriend.

But he thinks that their _technical_ beginning, as a real _us_, is probably marked by the summer after high school when he makes plans to travel across Europe with Vanessa and Carter Baizen appears to whisk her away, but they both bail early on their trips because it doesn't feel quite _right_, to spend the last official summer of their childhood _away_ like that.

Serena hops off her plane, into a cab, and onto the Jitney without ever pausing. Nate flies back in a private helicopter and makes a stop at home to ditch his oversized backpack for his familiar old, reliable duffel bag. By the time he arrives at the Hamptons house the sky is dusty pink and Serena is sitting on his front steps. The second she sees him she jumps up, running over to throw her arms around his neck. There were no questions, no confusion about his original plans or where she'd disappeared to or how, exactly, they both hoped (knew) one another would be there; they just knew it was meant to be. He set her back on the ground, releasing her from his embrace, and they both walked back to her family's summer home.

He tears himself out of his drunken musings, distracted by her, just wanting to _look_. He's lying on his back in the grass between the two rows of huge, old trees that line the sides of what he's always thought of as a backyard to the backyard of the Rhodes family's Hamptons house. It is silent at this hour, and the quiet makes the moonlight, slipping in between the trees to rest against Serena's skin, make her look poetic somehow, he thinks.

Nate appreciates it, the silence that's descended over the Hamptons through the season. At first it seemed odd, broken only by Serena's laughter or the music she'd blare through the house, but he eventually grew to like it, appreciating how private it made their summer feel. All of their childhood friends are in their late teens and early twenties; there are very few children running around, no backyard soccer games or pool parties or sandcastle-building parties, and the locals rarely dare to disturb the impeccably-maintained streets lined by imposing mansions that often have gates or security guards. Nate's house is completely empty save for one of those very guards and a gardener occasionally milling around the property, so he's pretty much been living with Serena. There are spurts of activity on her property: Cece spends two separate weeks there, spoiling them by having the staff make elaborate breakfasts and watching them knowingly, but mostly staying out of their way. Serena's entire mixed-up family descends for ten busy days, and Nate was (mostly) patient with her mother and step-siblings taking up most of Serena's time. Eric stuck around for a couple extra days and indulged them in outdoor games; Blair and Chuck came down for a separate weekend, a polo match they needed to attend, which was basically forty-eight hours of drunken bonding as a foursome that they all enjoyed. But for most of the summer, it's just been Nate and Serena, absorbing the sun and the silence.

Serena is sitting crossed-legged at his side, a nearly-empty beer bottle nestled in against the crook of one of her bare legs. She is wearing his grey hoodie, especially soft after having been worn for years, and it covers up the top of red string bikini and her tiny denim shorts. She's studiously peeling a clementine and Nate finds himself momentarily mesmerized by the movement of her fingers. He's drunk, he knows, but he thinks he is drunk in the very best way possible.

"What're you looking at, Archibald?" she asks wryly, but the truth is that she kind of likes the pressure of his gaze on her, even if it does have the power to make her mildly lightheaded. Her words sound a bit slurred even to her own ears, and when she looks over at him through lowered eyelashes she sees a lopsided grin on his lips that tells her he must hear it, too.

"You," Nate says simply, answering her at last, "Lookin' at you." He reaches out, touches her hair, which is tangled from having dried with seawater in it. "Beautiful," he pronounces her, softly.

Serena giggles, telling herself that the heat in her cheeks is just from alcohol. She pulls off a section from the Clementine and leans over to slip it between his lips. "Drunk," she responds in turn, bestowing the adjective on him teasingly. She loses her balance a bit and has to fall against her elbow to keep herself partially upright.

He chews, swallows, and says: "But you're _always_ beautiful. I'm only drunk _sometimes_."

Giggling again, she ducks her head a bit, hair falling in a curtain across her cheek. She's not sure how to respond, because he's said it like it's some kind of indisputable truth and he's watching her again.

Looking at Serena, Nate is struck suddenly by how _very_ true his own words are, overwhelmed by how beautiful he is right now. He finds that he can't quite think straight.

"Nate?" She eats her own piece of clementine and looks at him inquisitively. "Are you thinking deep thoughts?" she asks sweetly, lips pursed, pushing their conversation back into safer territory. She searches his face, waiting patiently for an answer.

Her lips are redder than usual, stained that way by the strawberry-daiquiri-flavoured Smirnoff coolers she was drinking earlier, they look full and…_kissable_, he thinks, and then shakes his head to clear away the thought, only managing because he has years of practice getting rid of his thoughts that involve Serena. He reaches out to nudge her elbow. "Lie back, like me," he instructs her. "Everything's…stiller. And you can look at the stars," he adds, wanting her to see the clear sky, to appreciate the fact that it's almost as beautiful as she is.

Serena settles onto her back, hair fanning out around her head like a halo. "We are _wasted_," she sighs, but her words are tinged with contentment, not regret. Right here, right now…it feels good, him and her. She doesn't want this to end. "Summer's gonna be over," she says softly. "Soon."

"We have to go to college," Nate marvels, eyes fixed on the sky.

Her hand clenches into a fist around a few blades of grass. "College," she echoes him in a whisper.

Nate turns to her, his blue eyes alarmed, and states the obvious: "You're sad."

She tries to smile but finds that she can't; she's too drunk to fake it. "I just…I don't know what…what I want to do." Another thought springs to her mind and she turns her head toward him. "And I'm going to be away. From New York. From _you_," she adds, because this is the essential part. Serena considers herself a citizen of the world, at times a citizen of nowhere at all. But she remembers boarding school and _missing _Nate, missing him so badly. She thinks of two months ago, when she flew away, running as usual, and felt an undeniable pull to come back and be with him this summer. Being away from him has proven to hurt. They drifted in and out of each other's lives through high school, after she returned, but she hates to lose the _possibility_ that is so important to her when it comes to Nate, the possibility of seeing him at any time, just walking down the street or across the quad and inviting him to get coffee.

His hand finds her clenched fist and he loosens her fingers slowly, weaves in his own. "We'll visit," he says, and it's a promise. "And you'll figure it out, what you want to do. I know you will."

"I guess." She blinks; the stars seem to be shining too brightly. A Gossip Girl blast from two months ago reverberates in her mind, along with the sting of the endless ways her father has evaded her. "I just don't want…" she takes a deep breath, "…to be irrelevant."

And just like he had that night when he sought her out on the city sidewalk, Nate comforts her. "You could never be," he says sincerely, because he really can't understand this worry of hers, wants her to see herself through his eyes so that she can dispel it. She is so much, she is _everything_, in every way – it's enough to make him dizzy.

"Never?" she asks softly, her voice wavering a little bit. She finds herself clinging to his fingers.

"_Never_," Nate replies firmly, "You're…_Serena_." He shrugs, his mind too fuzzy to supply him with the words to explain to her what this means, to tell her that she becomes the center of his world whenever she's in it.

Serena sucks in her breath and lets out a watery laugh. "You say that like…" She trails off, rolls onto her side, curling toward him.

His eyes roam over her face, trying to figure out what she's left unsaid. In the end, when he can't quite find it, he simply smiles and shrugs. "I say it like you're…you're unforgettable. You're…when you're not around something feels empty, y'know? But then when you _are_ around, you…you light everything up. You make it all…realer." He reaches out, resting his fingertips lightly against her jaw, and smiles a bit wider, proud of himself for coming to this conclusion: "You make it all _relevant_."

Leaning into his touch, she lays her fingers lightly over his, looking at him in cautious wonderment. "I do all of that…" She pauses to breathe, her eyes hazy and pretty and have they always been _that_ blue? "I do all of that…for you?"

It makes his heart thump, because _of course she does_. Of course she does, and how could she ever think otherwise? How come she won't let him do the same for her?

The questions do not have time to travel to his lips before the sky is split by lightning. They both glance upward as the thunder rumbles over their heads, and then the lightning crashes once again, sending heavy rain down onto them and breaking the moment.

They both scramble to their feet, and Nate glances at the tent they set up earlier in the night, when they were just _tipsy_ not _drunk_ (Serena was of zero help, struggling with poles and fabric and attempting to set it up upside down), for this specific occasion, because the radio has been warning that their might be rain and they are certainly drunk enough to think that the house is _way_ too far away.

He glances at the sky, at the house off in the distance, and at the tent he valiantly tried to put up correctly, and decides that it's good enough for now. "We should go in," he calls to her over the sound of the sudden downpour, reaching for her wrist.

But Serena isn't paying attention to him; she's got her hands balled up into the sleeves of his sweater to keep them warm, and her head tipped back, eyes closed. He shakes his head and opens his mouth to tell her she should come inside the tent with him, but then she opens her eyes and looks at him, her lashes dripping tiny, perfect drops of water and her smile soft and sweet, and the words get stuck in his throat.

She holds out both hands to him, like they're little kids again. She's not entirely sure what she's asking of him, she just knows that she wants him closer to her. He slips his hands into hers without questioning it, squeezing her fingers lightly as he closes the distance between them, standing directly in front of her.

"We're gonna get sick," he tells her laughingly, barely even listening to his own words, because he's too caught up in staring at her. Her hair is wet, her skin is wet; his hooded sweater she's wearing was wet and clinging to her body. "Coughing and sneezing, and you'll whine the whole time…"

Giggling, she pokes his chest, her finger lingering a little too long. "You'll have to take care of me."

He rolls his eyes, his hands making their way to her hips somehow, pulling her toward him. She shivers a little in his arms, cuddling into him instantly, even though she's the one wearing a sweater.

"See, cold already," he points out, wrapping his arms around her a bit more. "We should go into the tent."

"One more minute," she murmurs, like she's ten years younger and trying to postpone her bedtime, tucking herself into him, her head beneath his chin. She breathes it all in, the scent of the rain and the scent of _him_, both of which she loves. Her lips brushing his skin at his neck, she asks, so quietly that she can't be sure he'll hear her: "Do you really think all of that?"

He knows, instantly, despite their drunkenness, what she is asking. However, because of his hazy state of mind, he finds himself laughing into her hair (it smells like sea salt and oranges), because it is, in some ways, a ludicrous question.

Serena pulls back to pout, and she notices the way Nate's eyes lose a little of their mirth, the way they turn deep navy blue and focus on her lips. She nudges his shoulder with her own. "Are you _laughing_ at me, Nathaniel Archibald?"

Shaking his head, he kisses the tip of her nose – impulsively, drunkenly, because for once they're alone and they're both single and _he can_ – and says firmly, "Yes, I think all of that." Her eyes light up and it makes him smile even as thunder rumbles up in the sky, and he touches her upper arms gently. "We need to get _out_ of the rain, S."

"I _like_ the rain," she protests, pushing her body a little closer to his.

He can see each individual freckle on her cheeks, each individual eyelash; he can _feel_ her breath on his skin and it makes him blink and lean away. She's too much of everything he wants, too close, too tempting. "Inside," he repeats, voice hoarse, lightly but firmly turning her body and physically directing her toward the tent.

She pauses a couple feet in front of the tent's entrance, looking at it critically. Her bare feet slip against the wet grass and she grabs on to Nate's arm to keep from falling. She peers into his face, searching for honesty. "Are you sure it's gonna stay _up_?"

"We'll find out," he shrugs, wiggling his eyebrow at her teasingly. She hasn't let go of his arm.

Serena's still hesitant. "You go in first," she says, and it might be a request, but he takes it as an order, unzipping the tent and ducking down. He's halfway in when he cracks a devious grin, reaching out and wrapping an arm around her waist, tugging her in after him.

"_Natie!"_ Serena shrieks, but her protest is drowned out by the wind, and she ends up inside the tent, half on top of him.

He's managed to kinda-sorta knock the wind out of himself, and Serena's practically lying on top of him; they're a tangle of limbs. Nate has to reach around her to zip the tent closed, and while it shields them from the rain they can both see and hear the way it pounds on the weak 'walls' of the tent and that, alone, makes them shiver a little.

Nate rubs Serena's calf without thinking about it, noticing her goose bumps through bleary eyes. "You just called me _Natie_?" he mutters; it's half a question. She smiles at him and he laughs. "I can't remember the last time you called me that."

She giggles, rolling a bit so that her body isn't slung across his. "Doesn't mean I didn't want to," she confesses.

Examining her face, he asks, in honest confusion: "So why…didn't you?"

Serena shrugs. "I guess, it just…it felt different, after I came back. You and me," she clarifies, turning to look at his face. "We felt different."

"Still? Do we still feel different?"

She shakes her head, her hair a mess against the tent's floor. She's getting tired now, her buzz wearing off the slightest bit. "No. We feel the same. We feel…back to normal. Don't you think?" she asks, closing her eyes.

"Yeah," he mutters, watching that way her eyelashes flutter.

Without opening her eyes, she can tell that he's frowning, she can sense it. "What?" she whispers softly. "You _don't_ think so?"

"It's just…back to normal…for you and me…"

"It's _this_," she says insistently, glancing over at him, lazily opening her eyes. "Just you and me, hangin' out…" His face comes into focus then, just inches from hers; it hits her hard and takes her breath away. The way he's looking at her…it _burns_ right through her, heats up every inch of her body. "This is you and me," she struggles to say, "what we're like…back to normal…"

"_Normal_ with you," Nate muses, and he almost laughs.

"We should sleep," Serena says suddenly, more loudly than necessary. "Each of us, in our own separate sleeping bags," she declares, and there are threads of a plea in her voice, _leave it, just leave it, us back to normal means not talking about us…_

She scrambles up, crawls across the tent on her knees and only realizes halfway there that this position is giving Nate a good look at her ass in these stupid short-shorts she wore today for some reason (she's just so comfortable around him that she forgets to edit herself), so she reaches for the sleeping bags in the corner and turns around to see that he's still watching her, just like she knew he would be.

"Serena." He says her name, and it's husky and soft and she doesn't mean to look at him but then she _does_, and it's right there, pulsing between them. Her hands tremble as she turns her attention back to the sleeping bag.

Nate tugs it out of her hands gently, looks at her imploringly, tries to make her understand that they have _here_ and they have _now_ and it's _okay_. "You want to know what _normal_ for us is?" He waits until her eyes meet his, shimming blue, and then his hand is slipping into her hair as he inches a bit closer to us. "_Normal_ is me wanting you _so bad_. And never…being able to have you."

Her lips part but she doesn't say anything for a minute; her mind is too slow from alcohol and the way he's looking at her for her to form a response right away. She swallows hard, and wants to say _normal is us being friends, normal is us just hanging out, too bad that you want me because I don't want you_ but her ability to lie drifted off somewhere between the champagne and the coolers, long before the mimosa they shared and the beer they drank, and the truth falls out of her mouth without her bidding, her voice heavy and honest, small and strangely nervous.

"You have me," she whispers, and finds that she's breathless. She touches his wrist, the one attached to the hand he's got tangled up in her hair behind her neck, shakes him a little because he can't _not_ know this, not after all these years. "You _have_ me."

That's all it takes. Walls drop down, permission is granted, he's flooded with relief and all the want of her he's always tried not to feel, and his hand at her neck is pulling her closer as he presses his lips against hers, gently and hungrily all at once.

And she gives into it, like she's been longing for him for as long as he's been wanting her (and she has), opening her mouth in an instant, letting his tongue sweep between her lips. He takes a moment just to kiss her, to thoroughly explore her mouth, to let it sink in that this, them, him and her, is happening, it's _happening_.

But it's been building up for too long and he's drunk off liquor and off of _her_ and it ruins any patience he ever had with this girl, causes his hands to find the hem of his own sweater on her body and tug it over her head.

Serena blinks at him, a little bit dazed and a little bit nervous, and then their legs get all tangled up and neither of them has the coordination to hold themselves up so they fall again, Nate's hands moving lightly across her stomach, creeping upward. She giggles a little (he's tickling her), feels his chest rumble against hers as he murmurs her name (_Serena_) against her neck and kisses the skin there.

"Nate," she whispers, breathily and almost dreamily, "what're we –"

Her question stops there, at the feel of his mouth on hers; his hands find hers, up above her head, and he holds her wrists lightly, pinning her down – but she doesn't feel trapped, her body beneath his. She shivers a little beneath him, feels his lips trail down her neck slowly, moving across her collarbone before dropping lower, following the lines of her bikini top over her breasts.

Serena's skin tastes a little bit salty and like summer rain and the slightest bit like that perfume of hers that he loves – he gets so lost in her that he doesn't notice, at first, her body shifting beneath his.

"Nate," she whispers, and he can feel the bones in her wrists moving delicately under her skin, asking him to release her, and he did. The second he lets go of her hands slip beneath his t-shirt, pushing it up and over his head, and removing it fully requires that he sit up a little.

She takes a second to admire him, a perfect boy (almost a man), to let her eyes drift down his body before he settles himself back over her carefully, mouth just above hers, their hipbones matching up. She sucks in a breath and then giggles again, smiling up at him, almost giddily; her eyes look glazed in the dark.

"Hi," she says.

Nate smiles back at her, tucks a few wet strands of her hair out of her face. "Hi." He wonders if he should say something else, maybe something monumental, something meaningful –

But then she's tilting her chin up, kissing him fiercely, and he thinks that says it all.

Her hands cup his cheeks for a moment, and then slip into his hair as he breaks away, moving to kiss his way down her body, between her breasts, his tongue darting out to slip underneath the material of her bathing suit a couple times before he drops kisses down her stomach – she's still perfect, her body impossibly lean, and he sees every quick breath she takes in the way her abs tighten, more and more as he moves further down her body, stopping right at the point where her shorts hit, low on her hips.

He straightens up a bit and she watches him, trustingly, impatiently, as he presses a kiss to one of her shoulders, his hand busy unbuttoning and unzipping her shorts and pulling them down her legs. Once they reach her calves she slips her legs out and kicks them away.

She feels more sober than she has in hours, looking at him and seeing the way _he_ is looking at _her_, letting him get rid of all her clothes. Nate's got one hand between her legs, a single knuckle drifting over her inner thigh, and her breath catches noisily in her throat. She thinks she might've blushed, right now, if her cheeks weren't already red.

Serena's bikini bottoms are pale green with some sort of swirling blue pattern on them and completely do _not_ match the red bikini top she has on, and Nate had found it strangely endearing when they'd gone swimming earlier. She is this unpredictable, beautiful mess of a girl and he just wants to get caught up in her, to get absorbed by the mess and have that beauty and follow each and every one of her unpredictable moods and endeavours.

His knuckle drifts right between her legs, running smoothly against that green-and-blue lycra, and her body moves, back arching the slightest bit. The fabric is damp to the touch and it takes him a moment, his brain still fuzzy and slow, to realize that it has been far too many hours since they'd gone swimming for her bathing suit to have retained any moisture at all, and his eyes fly to her face.

She's looking at him through heavy eyelashes, her cheeks pink, breathing hard. He stares at her a beat too long and she gasps, "_Nate_…" Her voice gets his attention and she smiles a little, still distracted by his hand's position. "C'mere…" She wants to say _I want you, I want you_ but she can hardly breathe, her attention focused on his knuckle, which moves slowly, a single stroke against the material of her bathing suit.

He leans up to kiss her, lets her undo the button and zipper on his jeans and push them down his legs hurriedly, and hears her make a little sound, something close to a sigh, at the back of her throat when he moves his hand to her back, toying with the strings of her bikini. It sounds so _delicate_, and he was the _cause _of it; the thought almost makes him lose it there and then.

"Nate, please…"

"Shh," he murmurs, doesn't want her to beg, because she doesn't have to _ask_; he wants her so badly he can feel it through his body, a continuous ache. Silencing her, he kisses her gently, just a little sloppily, as his hand tugs at the knot holding her top on. "Okay?" he asks her faintly, pressing a kiss to the corner of her mouth.

Serena nods, her eyes squeezed shut, completely certain in a way she always is with Nate, even when she shouldn't be. "Yeah," she gasps out against his lips, surrendering to his kiss again as he pulls the knot loose; she arches her back to allow him easier access.

It's like he hits a switch, with that one movement, because then they're scrambling, clumsy and breathless and laughingly lightly, to rid each other of all remnants of their clothing; her bikini comes of and so do his boxers.

Seeing her naked reminds him of the last time he saw her mostly-naked, skin bathed in sunlight and mouth tasting like champagne, a wedding and a bar, and it makes him feel younger, shakier – he probably looks at her the same way he did a little over three years ago, something like reverence with some adoration thrown in.

"Beautiful," he says simply, for the third time that night, and Serena feels dizzy lying there on the bottom of their tent, just from _Nate_ and the way his hands are moving slowly over her body, burning a trail against her skin. One of his hands cups one of her breasts and his mouth falls to other and he's got her whimpering in seconds, her hands clutching at his back. She can feel him, hard against her hip, and she feels a little shaky, she _needs_ him.

"Nate?" she whispers. She needs to say more but every word keeps getting stuck in her throat.

He shakes his head a little, needing to clear it, closes his eyes as she cups his jaw in her hand and presses kisses all over his face; her hips shift a little under his and he groans. "I just…I've waited so long for…_you_." It's the second time tonight he wishes he were a bit more coherent, to explain it to her, but her eyes are sparkling up at him and that train of thought drifts away.

"You _have_ me," Serena murmurs, promising him again. She's breathing heavily, nipping at his lips. "So _take me_."

She wraps him up in her, arms around his neck, legs around his waist, slips a hand between their bodies to guide him inside her –

And then the earth stills, it seems, just for a second, the rain on tent fades way away and he feels totally, completely sober; grits his teeth a little bit because _wow, she feels good_ and watches her face carefully, the way her nose wrinkles the slightest bit as she winces and wiggles her hips a little, adjusting to the feel of him.

Serena's eyes flutter open, finding his instantly as she takes a deep breath. He's watching her face, an arm braced on either side of her head, and she gives him a little smile. It's been so long since the one time she was with this boy, but then, like now, they just seem to…_meld_ together, a perfect fit to one another. It's oddly familiar even after all this time, but also new and just _oh_.

"Nate…" she says his name again, and this time it sounded a lot more like a moan as her hips buck against his.

He kisses her sweetly, but the movement of his lips against hers gets more frantic as he thrusts and her back arches; he swallows her quiet scream. They're both so close in what seems like seconds, years of build-up throwing them quickly towards this moment; she's breathing fitfully between kisses, clenching around him as he moves in deeper into her every thrust, and he's flooded with _finallythisgirlrightnow_. He's not sure whose orgasm hits first, but she's tight around him and he's buried so deep inside her and whoever comes first takes the other with them; he wants to remember the way she says his name (_Nate, oh…_) the second she hits her high.

Gasping in some air, she tucks her face toward his, where it's buried against her neck. She relaxes a little bit around her, slowly coming back down, and murmurs, barely audible but completely sweet, "Natie…" And he lifts his head like he just _knows_ what she wants, and while he's still inside of her he kisses her, so tenderly it makes her eyes water when they break apart.

"You good?" he murmurs, his voice soft and husky as he eyes her with the slightest bit of worry in his own blue gaze.

Serena nods, blinks in the hopes of drying her eyes, and allows herself to cling to him just for a second. "Better than," she says faintly and _feels_ the grin that ghosts over his lips as he presses his lips to her cheek.

He slips out of her, reaches for the sleeping bag she unzipped earlier; she's blinking heavily and he knows Serena, knows that she tends to get tired when her buzz (in whatever form) starts to wear off. He wraps them both up in the single sleeping bag and she cuddles into him automatically, her body getting tangled up with his.

She makes a contented little sound at the back of her throat, something close to a purr, and he laughs, trying to quell it when she frowns up at him sleepily. She's caught her breath now but she just doesn't want to move. The steady beat of the rain against the tent is soothing, like a lullaby, and she knows deep down that when she and Nate acknowledge the fact that they're not quite as drunk as they were before and that they just had the kind of sex that _means something_, they said things that _mean _things, now everything's going to change, and she just wants a minute to revel in the afterglow.

"I missed you," she murmurs tiredly, smiling a little against his chest; she's too tired to explain that she means everything about him, not _just_ sex…though admittedly, it was wonderful to have him again, to let him have her again.

His hand moves down her back, fingers against her spine. He understands anyway. "Missed you, too," he replies, noticing the way she's fighting slumber. "Sleep, baby," he tells her gently, pulling the sleeping bag a little tighter around their bodies.

Serena peeks up at him through her eyelashes. She tries to memorize every single detail of this night and hopes she won't have the kind of hangover morning that results in confusion and forgetfulness. She feels like they're at a…a precipice, or something, and maybe she's stupid and drunk and her mind is too full of post-coital hormones so she's not thinking clearly, but she suddenly wants to make the jump with him, to just fall and catch each other. "Can we talk tomorrow?" she mumbles.

Nate laughs and ducks his head a little, resting his forehead against hers. "Since when do I say no to you?"

She's too sleepy to say anything other than, "Mm," snuggling just a little bit closer.

He buries his nose and mouth into her hair, damp from rain and perspiration, and breathes her in; he can feel her heartbeat and he finds that he loves it. "Promise me you won't run away in the morning," he whispers to her, baring his heart in the way he's learned to be hesitant to do around her because a lot of the time they both end up broken, but his voice is probably too quiet to be heard over the _thrumthrumthrum_ of the rain on the roof of the tent, and anyway, her body is perfectly relaxed against his, and her breathing is even against his skin; she's too far off into dreamland to hear him.


End file.
